Food Availability and Maternal Immunization Affect Transfer and Persistence of Maternal Antibodies in Nestling Pigeons
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ability of mothers to transfer antibodies (Abs) to their young and the temporal persistence of maternal Abs in offspring constitute important life-history traits that can impact the evolution of host-parasite interactions. Here, we examined the effects of food availability and parental immunization on the transfer and persistence of maternal antibodies in nestling pigeons (Columba livia). This species can transmit maternal Abs to offspring before hatching through the egg yolk and potentially after hatching through crop milk. However, the role of this postnatal substance in immunity remains elusive. We used a full cross-fostering design to disentangle the effects of food limitation and parental immunization both before and after hatching on the levels and persistence of maternal Abs in chicks. Parents were immunized via injection with keyhole limpet hemocyanin antigens. Using an immunoassay that specifically detected the IgY antibodies that are known to be transmitted via the yolk, we found that the levels of anti-KLH Abs in newly hatched chicks were positively correlated with the levels of anti-KLH Abs in the blood of their biological mothers. However, this correlation was not present between chicks and their foster parents, suggesting limited IgY transfer via crop milk to the chick's bloodstream. Interestingly, biological mothers subjected to food limitation during egg laying transferred significantly fewer specific maternal Abs, which suggests that the transfer of antibodies might be costly for them. In addition, the persistence of maternal Abs in a chick's bloodstream was not affected by food limitation or the foster parents' anti-KLH Ab levels; it was only affected by the initial level of maternal anti-KLH Abs that were present in newly hatched chicks. These results suggest that the maternal transfer of Abs could be costly but that their persistence in an offspring's bloodstream may not necessarily be affected by environmental conditions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".